Jerusalem

The woman looked at him, eyes narrowed quizzically, miniature fans of decorative wrinkles opening and closing at their corners.

“Oatsie. Oats and barley. Yer a Londoner.”

She cocked her head a little back and to one side, regarding him with what seemed like a frown of deep suspicion, so that for a minute he was worried. Had the girl got something against London? Then her face relaxed into a smile again, except that now the grin had something of a knowing, cat-like quality.

“From Lambeth. West Square, off St. George’s Road in Lambeth. Am I right?”

The baby had lost interest in Oatsie now, and entertained herself by bunching her small fists, painfully from the look of it, within the copper tangles of her mother’s hair. He felt his jaw drop open for the second time in just about as many minutes, although this time was no prelude to hilarity. Frankly, it rather put the wind up him. Who was this woman, who knew things she couldn’t know? Was she a Gypsy? Was all this a dream that he was having at the age of six, about the funny world there’d be when he was older, sleeping fitfully, his shaved head rasping on the rough cloth of a workhouse pillow? There and then he felt as if he’d let his hold on what was real slip from his fingers, and a momentary vertigo came over him so that the crossroads’ arms seemed almost to be spinning like the needle of a broken compass, chimney smoke and gilded clouds whirled into streaming mile-wide hoops, caught by the centrifugal tug of the horizon. He did

not know, any longer, where he was or what was going on between him and this startling young mother. Even at a distance he’d known that she’d turn out to be lively, but the actuality of her went far beyond what he’d foreseen. She was a shocker, her and her unearthly daughter both.

Seeing the panic and confusion in his eyes she laughed again, a throaty bubbling that was shrewd and faintly lewd as well. He had a sense that she enjoyed putting a scare in people now and then, both for her own amusement and to show her power. While his respect for her was mounting by the second, the desire he’d felt when he first saw her was evaporating in direct proportion. This was someone who despite her modest stature was a bigger person than he knew himself to be. This girl, he thought, could eat him, then burp raucously and be upon her way without a second thought.

At last, though, she took pity on him. Disentangling her ringlets from the baby’s fingers while the younger May was suitably distracted by another gliding, jingling tram, she proved that she was no professional magician by explaining just how her mind-reading turn had been accomplished.

“I’m from Lambeth, just off Lambeth Walk in Regent Street, that little terrace. Vernall. That’s me maiden name. I can remember ’ow our mam and dad would take me out around there when I was a little girl. There was a pub they went to, up the London Road, and when we come ’ome we’d cut back across West Square. I see yer there a time or two. You had a brother what were older, didn’t yer?”

He was relieved, though hardly less amazed. The woman’s feat of memory, although far past his own capacity, was not untypical amongst those who’d grown up in crowded little neighbourhoods, where everyone appeared to know the names of everybody else within a two-mile radius, along with all their children’s and their parents’ names and all the mystifying quirks and threads of happenstance that linked the generations. Having never learned the trick of it himself, perhaps because he’d always hoped he wouldn’t be stuck in those places very long, he’d been thrown off his guard when it was played upon him, here in this improbable location, in this far-flung town. Unlike the woman, he could not remember any childhood meetings for the life of him.

“Yes. You’re right, I had a brother Sydney. Still have, for that matter. When were you around there, then? How old are you?”

She raised, at this point, a reproachful eyebrow at his lack of manners, asking her about her age, but finally replied.

“Old as me tongue but older than me teeth. I’m twenty, if you must know. I was born the tenth of March in 1889.”

The more she reassured him that there was a natural explanation for her knowing his childhood address, the eerier the incident of their chance meeting struck him. This surprisingly imposing woman had been born within a month of him and lived perhaps two hundred yards from him while he was growing up. Now here they both were, sixty miles and twenty years away from where they’d started out, stood at one of a hundred corners in one of a hundred towns. It made him think again about his previously held opinions as regards predestination, and if people ever really had an inkling of the path ahead of them. He could see now that it was actually two separate questions that required two different answers. Yes, he thought that probably there was a pattern in how things occurred that had been drafted out beforehand, or at least it sometimes seemed there was, but then again he also thought that if there were such a design it would be far too big and too outlandish to be read or understood, so no one could predict how all its curlicues were going to be resolved, except by accident. You might as well attempt to forecast all the shapes a purple sunset-cloud would make before it burned away, or which cart would give way to which when they met at the crossroads’ corners. It was all too complicated to make sense of it, whatever all the prophets and the tea-leaf readers might pretend. He shook his head, replying to her, muttering something inadequate about it being a small world.

The lovely baby was now squirming restlessly, and Oatsie was afraid her mother would use this excuse to take her home and end their conversation, but she asked instead what he was he was doing at the Palace of Varieties, or the Vint Palace as she seemingly insisted upon calling it. He told her how he generally did a bit of this, a bit of that, but how tonight he was appearing with Fred Karno’s Mumming Birds as the Inebriate. She said it sounded proper funny, and said how she’d always thought it would be nice to be someone who worked in entertainment.

“Mind you, it’s our kid, our Johnny. ’E’s the one who’s always going on about the stage. This is me youngest brother. Reckons that ’e’s gunna end up in theatre or else playin’ music in a band, but ’e’s all talk. ’E wunt ’ave lessons, wouldn’t even if we could afford ’em. Too much like ’ard work.”

He nodded in response, watching a milk cart headed back towards its depot at the bottom of the street, downhill behind her. From where he was standing it appeared about an inch high, dragged by its disconsolate and shrunken mare along the girl’s right shoulder, losing itself in the autumn forest of her hair for quite some time before it re-emerged upon her left and then slunk wearily from sight.

“Well, if your brother doesn’t want to put the hours in, he won’t get too far as a performer. Mind you, he could still make money as a manager or impresario, and then he could be as bone idle as he liked.”

She laughed at this, and said she’d pass on the advice. He took advantage of the pause to ask her why she’d called the venue the Vint Palace.

“Oh, it’s ’ad lots of names over the years. Our dad’s ’ad family in Northampton ever since I can remember, always going back and forth from here to Lambeth, so ’e’s kept up with the changes. It began as the Alhambra Music Hall, from what ’e said, and then they changed it to the Grand Variety around the time what I was born. Accordin’ to our dad there was a bad patch sometime after then, when it weren’t even a theatre for a while. For getting on five years it weren’t the same place one month to the next. It was a greengrocer’s and then it was a place where they sold bikes. It was a pub they called the Crow before that moved across the street to be the Crow and Horseshoe, and I can remember when I was a little girl ten years back and it was a coffee house. All the free-thinkers as they called ’em used to go in there, and they were some right ’Erberts, I can tell yer. Anyway, the year the Queen died, that was when they done it up and christened it the Palace of Varieties. Old Mr. Vint, he bought the place a year ago, but still ain’t ’ad the sign changed.”

Oatsie nodded, looking at the old establishment in a new light. Because he’d come here as a Lancashire Lad all those years ago and it was a variety hall then, he had assumed that it had been one ever since, that it had always been one and, in every likelihood, it always would be. The young woman’s casual listing of the purposes to which the premises had been put in the meantime made him feel uncomfortable, although he couldn’t put his finger on the reason why. Oatsie supposed it was because the world he’d been brought up in, horrible and suffocating as he’d reckoned it, at least stayed where it was from one year, often from one century, unto the next. Even this shabby corner of Northampton here, a place about as run down as the Lambeth he’d been born to, you could see most of the buildings standing round you were still housing the same businesses they’d housed a hundred years before, even if names and management were different now. That’s why the girl’s account of the hall’s changing fortunes had unsettled him, because the story was a relatively rare one still, although you heard more like it every week. What should it all be like, he wondered, if these here-today-and-gone-tomorrow fleapits came to be the rule, not the exception? If he were to come back here in, say, forty years time and found it was a place that sold, he didn’t know, electric guns or something like that, and no longer a variety hall? Perhaps by then there wouldn’t even be variety halls. Well, that was an exaggeration, obviously, but it was how May’s off-hand narrative had made him feel, uneasy with the way that things were going these days, in the modern world. He changed the subject, asking her about herself instead.

“You sound as if you know the place, gal, anyway. How long is it you’ve lived here now?”

She cast her eyes up thoughtfully at scraps of lilac cirrus on a field of deepening blue, while her astonishingly well-behaved and patient offspring sucked a gleaming thumb and stared, it seemed indifferently, at Oatsie.

“Ninety-five, I think it was, when I was six we come up ’ere, although our dad, ’e’s always goin’ back and forth, to get the work. ’E walks it, the old bugger, all the way to London and then back. Many’s the time when we’ve not seen ’im for six weeks, not ’ide nor ’air, then ’e comes waltzing in ’alf-cut with presents, little bits and bobs for everybody. No, it’s not a bad old place. This bit round ’ere’s a lot like Lambeth, ’ow the people are. Sometimes I ’ardly feel as if we’ve moved.”

Some of the narrow shops across the other side of Horseshoe Street were putting lights on now, a dim glow tinged with green around its edges that crept out between the sparse and shadowy displays in their front windows. Lowering her gaze from up among the chimneybreasts, the elder May looked proudly dow

n now at the younger, cradled in her sturdy, tiger-lily arms.

“I think I’m ’ere for good. I ’ope I am, at any rate, and ’ope the little ’un shall be, too. They’re a straightforward lot round these parts, in the main, and there’s some real old characters. It’s where I met me chap, my Tom, and we got wed up at the Guildhall. All ’is people, they’re all local, all the Warrens, and we’ve lots of family up ’ere on the Vernall side as well. No, it’s all right, Northampton is. They do a good pork pie, and there’s some lovely parks, Victoria, Abington, and Beckett’s. That’s where I’ve just took this one, down by the river there. We saw the swans and went out on the island, didn’t we, me duck?”

This was directed at the baby, who was finally beginning to show signs of restlessness. Her mother stuck out her own lower lip and turned her brows up at a tragic angle, mimicking her daughter’s glum expression.

“I expect she’s ’ungry. Goin’ down the park I stopped at Gotcher Johnson’s for two ounce o’ rainbow drops, but I ’ad one or two as well, so they were finished up some time ago. I’d better get ’er ’ome up Fort Street for ’er tea. It’s potted meat, ’er favourite. It’s been nice to meet yer, Oatsie. ’Ope yer skit goes well.”

At that, he bade goodbye to both the Mays, and said it had been similarly nice to meet the pair of them. He shook the baby’s damp, minuscule hand and told her that he hoped to see her name on a big hoarding one day. To her mother he just said “Take care of her”, then as the woman chuckled and assured him that she would, he wondered why he’d come out with it. What a stupid thing to say, as if suggesting that she wouldn’t look after a child like that. The babe and parent waited until there was nothing coming, then they crossed the foot of Gold Street and went up the hill towards the north. He stood there on his corner and admired the woman’s bum, moving beneath her swinging skirt as she mounted the slope, with her imagined buttocks like two faces pressed together as their owners acted out a vigorous two-step. Or perhaps two wrestlers full of muscles in a crush, each one in turn gaining an inch on their opponent who immediately takes it back, deadlocked so that they merely seem to heave from side to side. He noticed at this point the baby, staring soberly across the woman’s shoulder at him as she was borne off into the distance. Feeling oddly mortified to think the child had caught him looking at her mother’s bottom he glanced rapidly away towards the plot of scrubland halfway down the hill, and when he looked back just a minute later they were gone.